The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [15]
“I did. I was surprised because I live in the valley. Living up here on the hill, you’ll lose it more often than I will,” Anise said. Then: “Well, I don’t want to keep you. I live on the road to the Notchway Inn. It’s the brick Georgian with the greenhouse and the overgrown paddock with the white fence. I don’t have horses, but a previous owner did. Don’t be strangers.”
“You know much about this house?” It was Chip speaking, and because it was the first time he had opened his mouth other than his softly murmured how-do-you-do, both she and Anise found themselves turning toward him with a combination of intensity and expectation.
“A little bit. I knew Sawyer and Hewitt Dunmore. It’s an interesting place, isn’t it?”
“Can I ask you a question?” Chip said.
“Absolutely,” answered this friend of their real estate agent.
“In the basement is a door. I noticed it the day before yesterday when I was bringing a load of laundry down there.”
“Okay,” she said, shrugging. “Where does it go?”
“I don’t know. I was hoping you might.”
“Nope.”
“It’s sealed shut.”
“Sealed?”
“With bolts. Lots and lots of carriage bolts.”
“That’s interesting. Based on the design of the house, where do you think it goes? Back up to the kitchen, I’d wager. I know the house has a back stairway linking the first and second floors. Why not one linking the basement with the kitchen?”
“Not likely. The kitchen would be above the other side of the basement. It seems to be a door to nothing. It’s at the edge of the house. All that’s above it is the screened porch. And that porch is just built above dirt.”
“I’ll bet it was a ramp, in that case. A wheelbarrow ramp.”
“There’s one of those on the other side of the basement—on the north side of the house.”
“Maybe it’s a coal chute then.”
“There is some old coal lying around it,” he admitted.
“There you go, mystery solved. The Dunmores—or the Pierces before them—probably built that screened porch after they stopped heating with coal.”
He nodded, but Emily knew that her husband wasn’t entirely convinced. The two of them had discussed the likelihood that it was merely a coal chute the afternoon he first noticed it. Certainly it was possible that’s all it was. But why would you use thirty-nine carriage bolts to seal it shut? (Emily feared the coincidence that there were the same number of bolts as there were fatalities on Flight 1611 was only going to exacerbate her husband’s fixation on the door.) Chip had removed one of the bolts, but it had taken an awl with a beveled point, a screwdriver, and a hammer—and nearly twenty-five minutes of struggling. It was six inches long. When he realized that the remaining thirty-eight were probably identical and might demand the same labor—kneeling in dirt and moldy, crumbling coal—he twisted the carriage bolt back into place and returned upstairs to unpack some more boxes. Over cups of decaffeinated coffee late that night, sitting on the floor in the den because here was one room where the wallpaper was a soothing pattern of blue and yellow iris, he and Emily discussed calling Hewitt Dunmore to ask about the strange door. But when Emily had phoned Hewitt yesterday about the possessions they’d come across in the house, everything from that extraordinary sewing machine to those eccentric figurines, she had found herself incapable of asking him about it—or, for that matter, about the crowbar, the knife, and the ax. He seemed too damn ornery. Besides, it was just a door to a coal chute, wasn’t it? She decided another time, perhaps.
“Yeah, that’s what we figured,” Chip said finally. “A coal chute.”
“What else could it be?” Anise agreed, and she raised her eyebrows and smiled once more. “It’s not like the Dunmores hid bodies down there.”
No, of course not, Emily thought.
“It must feel wonderful to be here,” Anise continued.
“It’s nice,” Emily agreed, carefully modulating her tone. Nothing in her life felt particularly wonderful right now. Besides, she hadn’t been here long enough to have any sense at all of whether moving to Bethel had been the right decision.
“Are